not without mustard :: current projects

Current Projects

Digital Renaissance Editions

Digital Renaissance Editions publishes electronic scholarly editions of early modern English drama and literature. Each edition includes an annotated modern-spelling text, collations of textual variants, critical and textual introductions, as well as photo-facsimiles and transcriptions of early print and manuscript editions and supplementary materials in a range of media. All content is peer-reviewed and entirely open access. I serve as one of four Coordinating Editors of the project.

Other Editorial Projects

  • A critical edition of Fair Em, an anonymous Elizabethan romance, for Digital Renaissance Editions.
  • A critical edition of Hyde Park, with Mark Houlahan (University of Waikato), for the ten-volume Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley, under the general editorship of Eugene Giddens, Teresa Grant, and Barbara Ravelhofer.

Literary Genre and Authorial Style

We assume that authors have a recognisable, individual ‘style’, but may vary their writing habits to accommodate the constraints and conventions of different genres. With funding from the British Academy and Jisc Digital Research in the Humanities scheme, this project asks, ‘Does literary genre affect an author’s style and, if so, how significant are these differences?’. Analysing a corpus of early modern literature using the methods of computational stylistics, the pilot study will attempt to measure the effect of genre on an author’s style by analysing stylistic differences and affinities in their prose, poetry, and drama. Dr Emily Mayne and Dr Rachel White are working with me as postdoctoral research fellows on this project to construct the corpus, process the texts, and co-author articles reporting the results.

Reproducing English Renaissance Drama, 1711–2016

The ways in which English Renaissance plays are edited and published offers valuable insights into their changing critical reception. This long-term project will offer the first detailed study of how English Renaissance plays have been edited and published since the eighteenth century, adding empirical data to debates about canon formation and extending existing scholarship that focuses exclusively on Shakespeare.

Combining quantitative and qualitative methods supplementing fresh insights from archival research, expected outcomes of this project include a monograph for the Arden Shakespeare Studies in Language and Digital Methodologies series and development of the Bibliography of Editions of Early English Drama.

Bibliography of Editions of Early English Drama

The Bibliography of Editions of Early English Drama (or BEEED for short) is an open-access bibliographical database of editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English drama. Although it is a descriptive bibliography, the database is designed primarily as a tool enabling quantitative analysis for editorial and publishing history.

Records include more than the standard library catalogue data, such as entries for bibliographical format, type-page width and height, editorial method, and critical apparatus, as well as links to items available online, whether born-digital or digitized surrogates. The database will be free to access and use, and subject to peer review for accuracy. With BEEED, editors may easily compile a list of editions for historical collation, and scholars may map trends in the production of editions over time.


© 2011– Brett Greatley-Hirsch